Chance the Rapper Releases ‘Coloring Book,’ With Spirit

Chance the Rapper

“Coloring Book”

For the last few years, Kanye West’s most visible disciple has been Drake, who mainlined his melody-first approach, his arriviste swagger, and most crucial, his emotional vulnerability. If Mr. West innovated by hinting at the chinks in his armor, Drake succeeded by making the chinks his armor.

But Drake has all but ignored Mr. West’s conscience, his spirituality, his connection to larger struggles, both racial and spiritual. In Drake’s hands, Mr. West has been a template for deep feeling and pop ascendance. But Mr. West’s other disciple, Chance the Rapper, sees something different in him.

To Chance, Mr. West is a hometown hero — they both come from Chicago — an agitator and a penitent, a guide for living a devout life without melting under public scrutiny. Twelve years ago, on “Jesus Walks,” from his debut album, “The College Dropout,” Mr. West loudly wondered if his spirituality could ever be harmonious with his celebrity.

The truest sign that Mr. West has succeeded is that these are not fractures at all for Chance, who on the jubilant, nourishing “Coloring Book,” his third solo release, has blossomed into a crusader and a pop savant, coming as close as anyone has to eradicating the walls between the sacred and the secular.

Make no mistake — this is an album full of gospel, even if it’s not, strictly speaking, a gospel album. There’s “How Great,” which interpolates Chris Tomlin’s “How Great Is Our God”; the sauntering “Blessings,” where Chance raps, “Jesus’s black life ain’t matter — I know, I talked to his daddy/Said, ‘You the man of the house now, look out for your family’”; and the confessional “Finish Line/Drown,” which features Kirk Franklin.

Mr. Franklin and Chance also shared space on Mr. West’s “Ultralight Beam,” from “The Life of Pablo,” on which Chance had a breathtaking verse: “Foot on the Devil’s neck ’til it drifted Pangaea/I’m moving all my family from Chatham to Zambia.”

That intimacy is echoed time and again on “Coloring Book.” Chance is one of hip-hop’s pre-eminent memoirists, a pinpoint recollector of childhood stories who uses them as universal parables. He opens “Summer Friends” with wistfulness: “Socks on concrete, Jolly Rancher kids/I was talking back and now I gotta stay at grandma’s crib.” But later, the song becomes a eulogy for that same childhood innocence, decimated by Chicago violence: “Our summer don’t get no shine no more/Our summer die, our summertime don’t got no time no more.”

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Chance the Rapper’s new album, “Coloring Book.”

Chance is a vernacular progressive, a dexterous rapper who shrugs at his own facility at every turn — for him, complexity isn’t a cudgel, it’s a showcase. He shows it off in the density of his rhymes, but mostly in his rhythms and melodies: few rappers are as comfortable with shifting gears mid-flow, and even fewer sound so at ease doing so.

Chance isn’t modest, though — at least, not about his ambition. He’s connected enough and comfortable enough to get a rare verse by the hip-hop specter Jay Electronica on “How Great,” corral Justin Bieber for a cameo on “Juke Jam” and to refer to Beyoncé as “Auntie Yoncé.” And though “Coloring Book” is advertised as a mixtape, it’s as tightly orchestrated as any album, full of guests who feel the same: Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz, clever on “No Problem”; a scrappy Young Thug and a startlingly great Lil Yachty on “Mixtape.”

That song is Chance’s statement of economic purpose: “How can they call themselves bosses when they got so many bosses?/You gotta see what your boss say/I get it straight out the faucet.” His resentment about record labels is mid-1990s in spirit, but transposed for an era in which an artist with his gifts doesn’t need one to succeed. (“Coloring Book” is currently available as an Apple Music streaming exclusive; it eventually will be released more widely, though will not be made available for sale.) He frames this distaste in religious terms: “They want four-minute songs/You need a four-hour praise dance performed every morn.”

Of course, in Chance’s universe, the pop song is the praise song. He’s a slick warrior for independent artists, for the sanctity and sanity of his hometown, for his family, for the Lord. Mr. West has been juggling concerns exterior and interior, big and small for more than a decade. With Chance, there’s no more need to juggle.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Chance the Rapper Releases ‘Coloring Book,’ With Spirit. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe